Letter from Harvard

What happens downstream of the eradication of federal grants and fellowships?

This week, I received the following letter. It is reprinted here with permission by the author, although he has asked to have his name redacted. I provide commentary after.

I am an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School. I am the first in my family to go to college and the son of a working-class household that knows the weight of loss, and the hope of science to recover such losses. I am also a three-time Trump voter from Washington State, and as one among few conservatives at Harvard, I think my perspective is quite unique.

When I was 11, I lost my mother, a strong, beautiful, and stunningly brilliant woman to cancer at the age of 48. That loss became a defining compass in my life. It is what led me to medicine, to science, and eventually to Harvard. From St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, TN, to the hospitals and labs boasted by Harvard, I have devoted over a decade of my career to understanding the proteomic and biochemical underpinnings of cancer. Having the honor of being a member of such an institution, in a fully funded MD-PhD, is a role I do not take lightly. It is the motivation of my life.

My current research — at the intersection of artificial intelligence, kinase signaling, and mass spectrometry — aims to understand how cancer cells rewire signaling networks and how we might stop them. So many of cancer's complexities rest beyond what is immediately perceptible to us, making AI critical in redefining our understanding of this disease. Our discoveries have real implications for drug development, targeted therapies, and the future of precision oncology. The algorithms I write in this endeavor have tremendous national security interest, and the scientific knowledge accrued in this field has great potential to impact the broader public. This is the very reason we devote so much to the funding of good science.

This week, I received word that the grant funding which supports my research — and that of countless other physician-scientists in training — has been terminated by the federal government. In fact, a majority of my MD-PhD cohort, who have fully funded positions in the medical school and graduate school, are no longer being funded.

In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has abruptly ended NIH funding to Harvard Medical School, including the cancellation of 32 F30 fellowship awards¹ and both of our MD-PhD training grants, representing millions of dollars lost just within our small cohort of ~100 trainees, all of whom are funded by the NIH. These cuts are not based on scientific merit, fiscal necessity, or public health priorities. They are political. And they threaten to unravel decades of progress.

I want your readers to understand what this means.

It means students like me, students from low-income backgrounds with a real hunger to effect change in this world, may no longer have a path to contribute to the future of medicine.² It means that entire labs will grind to a halt. It means that research into Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, and more may be delayed or derailed. It means that scientific innovation, which has long been a point of pride and promise in this country, is now vulnerable to political retaliation.

For those of us who have given our lives to research, this isn’t a funding issue. It’s a moral issue. To defund science is to betray the very people we seek to serve — patients, families, the future.

I urge ​you to shine a spotlight on this story. There is more than academic inconvenience at stake. There is a fundamental question of who we are as a country and whether we will continue to stand behind science, truth, and the kind of future my mother dreamed her son might live to build.

Sincerely,
[name redacted]
MD-PhD Candidate
Harvard Medical School

The author and I exchanged several emails after he sent me this. He provided both more details on his research³, and moving words on the tragic early death of his mother. I am compelled that he is doing valuable and honest scientific work, and that his agreement with Harvard was contingent on Harvard’s agreements with NIH, which have been yanked through no fault of his own.

As the author of the letter says in a later communication with me,

Scientific funding is largely bloated and cuts are certainly necessary, but outright termination of funding across entire universities likely does more harm than good.

I agree with him.

But let’s take a step back for a moment.

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American science has become so reliant on federal funding that even the wealthiest institutions run much of their operations on the taxpayers’ dime. Or perhaps it is especially the wealthiest institutions that rely the most on federal funds.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) runs an annual survey called the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey. The HERD Survey attempts to summarize how much research each institution of higher education in the United States does, as measured by that most quantifiable of proxies—dollars. That is: research is variable in quality and effect, but dollars are dollars, so let’s assume that the best research is both the most expensive, and the best funded, and just count the grant dollars that came in.

These assumptions are some of what led us into the scientific morass we’re in today, but put that (substantial) criticism aside for the moment. What does the HERD Survey reveal?

Spend time looking through many of the HERD Survey's tables, if you will, but in case you’re not so inclined, just take a look at these top 15 rows of table 24, which shows federally financed higher education R&D expenditures for fiscal years 2010 – 2023:

Note a few things:

• Data are in thousands of dollars. So, for instance, in 2023 at Johns Hopkins, at the top of the list, there were

  • 3,324,551 * 1,000 = $3,324,551,000 in federal R&D funds. That’s far north of three billion dollars. I do hope that they did good work with that money.

• All of the top “earners” in federal grant monies are garnering substantially more every single year, from 2010 – 2023. In those 13 years, most universities have increased their take from the federal coffers by at least 50%.

• Money begets money, both at the individual and institutional level.

The total amount of federally financed higher education R&D expenditures in 2023 was over $59 billion dollars.⁴

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Taxpayer dollars fund American science at a level that is difficult to comprehend, and utterly shocking to many. How science can and should be funded is a tricky question with no easy answers. Back in the era of gentlemen scientists, being born white and male into a family of means was necessary (and hopefully not sufficient) if one wanted to try one’s hand at science. Today, being the “wrong” race, sex, or class are not inherent barriers to being a scientist. Surely this is progress.

But when you make headway in solving one set of problems, be assured that you will create new ones. Now that science is available to more people: How shall it be funded? If it is to be funded by the public, as so much of American science is, who gets to make the decisions?

Letting only “experts” decide—those people who are already intimately familiar with the questions and methods in play—creates the perfect conditions for the same kind of circle jerk we see in peer review. Science becomes a popularity contest, and the most fashionable ideas, rather than the ones with the most promise, get funded.

But letting people wholly unfamiliar with the research decide what will get funded seems absurd. On what basis would they make their decisions?

Public funding of science seems to me to be the (or at least a) right solution, but operationalizing it fairly and objectively may be impossible. Collectively, we have allowed the entire system to become broken. So much of what passes for science isn’t science at all. The questions being asked are overly simplistic,⁵ or the research is corrupt,⁶ or the whole enterprise comprises a rejection of reality.⁷

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And yet: actual science, science which is not beset with conflicts of interest or incompetence or fraud, is a beautiful, necessary human endeavor. And much of the value of scientific exploration is not in the form of obvious positive ramifications for human health or well-being. We can’t know what avenues may open up later as a result of basic research today. We cannot know.

So it may be fun to laugh at absurd sounding research, but we cannot restrict ourselves to asking only questions that have obvious utility. If we do so, our horizons will narrow, our vision will constrict, and ultimately, we will have no creativity, no analysis, no capacity at all. This is the unhooking of the human spirit. Science is an expansive and liberating endeavor that, when edited down to only its most practical manifestations, becomes a straitjacket.

Science is and must remain open. Technology and engineering are important, too, but they’re different. “Basic research,” the kind that “just” tries to answer questions about reality, is necessary. But we are failing to teach people to think broadly, to ask big questions, to make careful predictions that follow from hypotheses. These are the core of science. Instead, today’s scientists are too often trained to do highly specific things with very narrow scope.

And yet—again, and yet—there are many good scientists still out there, with more in the wings. Surely some among them are at Harvard. A May 14 email signed by both the president and provost of Harvard began thusly:

We write today to reaffirm the University’s commitment to the research enterprise as we navigate this extraordinarily challenging time. Last month, the federal government announced a freeze on more than $2 billion of grants and contracts that had been competitively awarded to Harvard researchers⁸.

A freeze of two billion dollars in grants and contracts is immense. As the MD-PhD student who wrote to me said in a later message to me,

The approach that is currently being taken by the Trump administration is with a sledgehammer rather than with a scalpel.

His analogy is a good one. Is a sledgehammer to the entire enterprise the only way to do this? Would a scalpel work?

I don’t think so. Scalpels are designed to do detail work—they don’t work at scale. Sledgehammers, on the other hand, can be scaled up. Sledgehammers, wrecking balls, bombs…agents of destructions exist at every scale. Maybe it all needs to be destroyed, before being rebuilt anew. Then the precision work can begin.

I remember, however, one of the most salient critiques of the leftist activists who took over American cities during the Summer of 2020, after George Floyd died in Minneapolis. Those activists, antifa clad in black bloc among them, had already been destroying good things for some years, including at The Evergreen State College, when my professorship there was unraveling, and in Portland, Oregon, where I lived afterwards. Nancy Rommelmann, who had been living in Portland for many years when the activist mob came for her husband’s business, brought that salient critique of those activists to the table: they create nothing. Destruction is easy, and they are good at it. They are creating only rubble and emptiness. With no thought to what happens afterwards, this is mere vandalism.

Is the DOGE⁹ approach akin to that of leftist activists, then? Or is the comparison unfair?

Antifa terrorized the good citizens of cities across America, including Portland, where they showed us who was boss by finally—finally!—knocking over several historic public sculptures, including those of presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, and sufficiently vandalizing an iconic bronze elk sculpture such that it was quietly disappeared. The elk had it coming, presumably. One could argue that leftist activists had some real grievances—persistent bias and prejudice, uneven playing fields that would not level themselves. Those small rocks of grievance, however, were overrun by rivers of confusion, hedonism, and fury.

DOGE is terrorizing good scientists by yanking their funding midstream, breaking contracts for work that had already begun, and effectively breaking promises to young scientists who had not merely worked hard, but worked well, to get where they are. They do not deserve to be terrorized. DOGE is also, however, terrorizing the very university administrators who have helped create and benefit from the mess. Those of us who voted for this administration—myself included—knew that the swamps of federal graft and other corruption needed to be drained. We knew that it would get ugly. This is very ugly indeed. It is also true that the hypocrisy of the administrators who helped create the grotesque mess that is being so uglily dismantled is now on full display.

Here is the director of Harvard’s joint MD/PhD program in a May 16 email that describes the vast cuts to Harvard’s federal funding, while asking the MD/PhD students to “stay focused and keep doing your critically important work:”

At least some among Harvard’s leadership apparently have heavy hearts and unwavering senses of duty. I do not doubt that this is true.

But where was the leadership at Harvard when, for instance, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was driven out of her position for daring to take the obvious position that sex in humans is real and binary? Dr. Hooven is now being encouraged by the leadership at Harvard to back them up, while they are under attack. Hunh. Seems that she could have used some back-up when an absolutely rudderless assault was made on her, and she ended up having to leave her job, one for which she had been celebrated, justly and often.

As Dr. Hooven wrote on May 19^th of this year:

Yes, Trump is overstepping, and there's lots worth saving. I also know I'm not alone in feeling that I can't stomach the hypocrisy of now being called on to do everything I can to help Harvard.

When I asked my correspondent at Harvard how he could be sure that the cuts his program was experiencing were political, he said this:

I do not want to give the impression that I believe there is no wasteful academic spending going on or controversial research being performed….I can empathize with the Trump Administration’s desire to cut certain projects. However, for work like mine and others who I know full well have tremendously powerful implications for the future of science and our country, I simply cannot rationalize a motive other than one which is political.

There are many incompetent, lazy, and greedy people among the good, and no approach would be perfect at discerning between them. Perhaps burning it all to the ground, a tactic shared by antifa and DOGE, is in fact the best approach. I am not sure.

There will, however, be much to clean up and rebuild in the aftermath. Will there be anyone left to do so?

1. NIH’s F30 fellowship awards are intended to “enhance the integrated research and clinical training of promising predoctoral students” in dual-doctoral degree training programs. They are meant for those who “intend careers as physician-scientists or other clinician-scientists,” and are available only to U.S. citizens.

2. While familial wealth obviously affects young people’s ability to pursue their dreams, family money can pay tuition, but will not fund research or degree programs, at least not directly. Thus, I am not compelled that these particular cuts will inherently affect low-income students more than middle- or upper- income students.

3. Here are just a few of the things that my correspondent had to say about his research (slightly edited for concision; any ambiguities may thus be my fault): “In a nutshell, I think of kinases as controllers of many different thermostats in a cell. They potentiate or dampen any given process they happen to regulate….Some of the most beneficial cancer therapeutics developed to date are called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) which function by shutting down aspecific kinase’s pathway….However, kinases are widely connected to a diverse number of other cellular partners, some of which are critical to cancer’s pathogenesis, but there are many other partners unrelated to the cancer itself, [which] are necessary for normal cellular function. Therefore, while TKI’s are highly effectiveat terminating cancer signaling, they come with tremendous cost.

“[I believe that] we could be much more surgical in our approach to treating cancer to target the targets of the kinases, rather than the entire kinase itself. This would involve robustly identifying all relevant substrates to a given kinase….If we had a better idea of what kinase targets were, and whether they were relevant to thecancer or not, we perhaps may find that, though a kinase can target thousands of sites, perhaps only a handful of them are relevant to the cancer’s pathogenesis.”

4. Federal monies are, of course, not the only source of R&D funding at American institutions. Table 7 of NSF’s HERD survey only includes four years of data (2020 – 2023), but has a useful side-by-side comparison of “total” vs “federal only” R&D expenditures by institution (organizations like the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation are examples of large, private funders of research). A quick scan shows high variability in the degree to which universities are dependent on federal funds as a fraction of all of their expenditures. In 2023, Johns Hopkins, at the top of the list, received 87% of their R&D monies from federal sources, while Harvard received a “mere” 45% of theirs from the government ($639 million in federal funds, part of a total of $1.4 billion). Also in 2023, Columbia, which has been much in the news, received 74% of their R&D funds, or nearly one billion dollars, from the federal government.

5. The problem of reductionism in modern science has been a drum I have been beating for years. One perhaps not-so-obvious example can be found in the conflation of types of melatonin—circulating vs subcellular, which I wrote about some in It Is Dark Inside Your Head. Also see The Tyranny of Metrics, which is an excellent short read.

6. The replicability crisis reveals but the tip of the iceberg of scientific corruption. See my On Fraud, and Being Science-ish for examples of scientific corruption in Alzheimer’s research, marine ecology, and spider biology.

7. The luxury belief that humans can change sex has spawned the most obvious examples of reality-denying research, and there is a lot of it. The most insane example I found in this area was funded, however, not by the federal government, but by the Wellcome Trust—which is a story unto itself. This entire article is an assault on reason: Jones et al 2018. Uterine transplantation in transgender women. Bjog, 126(2): 152-156.

8. A freeze of two billion dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard means that either a) Harvard more than tripled its annual take of federal R&D monies since 2023, when the HERD survey reported that Harvard, at #28 on their list, brought in $639,953,000 in federal monies, or b) the number reported by Harvard’s leadership in this email reflects several years’ worth of grant monies that have been frozen, meaning that the impact is far less than an immediate two billion dollar shortfall. It is almost certainly the latter.

9. In fact, as Dick Minnis points out in the comments of this piece, this was not DOGE that oversaw these cuts. I used DOGE inaccurately here, but am leaving it in as a broad reference to the sweeping federal reforms being affected by the Trump administration. Minnis accurately points out that blaming all of the chaos on DOGE is an example of the media changing the narrative to suit their goals; I would argue that the administration, too, is effecting a lot of change under various guises, some of which is more similar than the names and stated goals would have us belief. I am leaving DOGE in here, then, both to not disappear my own mistake, and as a sort of “sensu lato” use case—No, it’s not technically DOGE, sensu stricto, that made these decisions, but it is, I think, very much the same idea.